Lea Carpenter
Lea Carpenter was a Founding Editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope. She graduated from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard. Her Harvard University Commencement Address, “Auden and The Little Things,” was about the need for poetry in our lives. She lives in New York with her husband and son where she produces programming for the New York Public Library. She formerly wrote the Think, See, Feel blog for BigThink.
This is Our Greatest Generation: Reflections From A Retired Special Forces Officer
What does today's anniversary of 9/11 mean for the 9/11 generation, who did not let America's greatest national tragedy break them. How will its legacy define their lives over time?
Lesson 21: Gloria Steinem’s Aphorisms; Fish, Power, Love, Bunnies, and Life
It turns out that the phrase “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” did not originate with Gloria Steinem, but rather was inspired by another phrase: […]
Lesson 20: JSOC-talk; When Less Is More: “For God and country: Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.”
The military tends to talk in signs and numbers—and, perhaps most famously, in code. The use of abbreviations and alphabetical systems is efficient. In this week’s New Yorker, we learn […]
Lesson 19: RFK; The Language of Atonement, and Classical References
Yesterday’s announcement that Robert F. Kennedy’s papers are being reviewed inspired us to revisit one of the former Attorney General’s finest speeches, one we have not written about here before. […]
Lesson 18: Sheryl Sandberg; Can A Speech Teach Ambition?
Ken Auletta’s profile of Sheryl Sandberg in The New Yorkeris an excellent companion to Sandberg’s TED speech of last December. The latter was passed like a Dead bootleg among a […]
Lesson 17: Rockstar Games, Violence, Justice: If It’s Violent, Do We Care If It’s Literature?
And if it’s literature, do we care if it’s violent? “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” wrote Justice Scalia, in his majority opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants […]
Lesson 16: W.H. Auden; War Talk, and Expectations
How do we speak and write about things when things are not going the way that we want? Not just little things, like lunch, but big things, like wars. Do […]
Lesson 15: Fermor; What Does A Soldier Scholar’s Prose Look Like?
Robert Kaplan’s op-ed on Patrick Leigh Fermor in the New York Times, “The Humanist in the Foxhole,” stands alone as a cool piece of writing worth studying. Kaplan writes: Unlike […]
The Intellectual Life of a Navy SEAL
A SEAL’s smartest weapon, like a scholar’s, is his mind: his capacity to assess complex situations. This assessment is then coupled with the courage to achieve a given goal, and the humility to move on quietly to the next task.
Lesson 14: Children’s Literature; The Genius of Go the F*** to Sleep
It’s not Dr. Seuss. But Go the F*** to Sleep is extremely powerful, and it’s extremely powerful for an audience who has supported and stomached and loved and memorized-to-the-point-of-loving-slightly-less the […]
Lesson 13: V.S. Naipaul: Does The Sex of The Author Matter?
V.S. Naipaul is without question or controversy one of the finest living writers. Yet the controversy surrounding his recent interview with the Royal Geographic Society, in which he effectively takes […]
Lesson 12: Pericles’ Funeral Oration; On Memorial Day, An Ode to Hearts and Soldiers
In his book, The Heart and the Fist, former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens writes about the Greek conception of phronesis. A kind of practical wisdom (a poor translation, but the […]
Lesson 11: James Joyce; Does Twitter Threaten Literary Genius?
New forms of writing will bring, as they always have, new ideas and new elements of creative genius.
Lesson 10: Harold Bloom; How Does Memorizing Shakespeare Change The Way We Think, or Write?
Sam Tanenhaus interviewed Harold Bloom for The New York Times; the video is here. It’s a very cool, very short, interview. It will be historic, too—not only for capturing Bloom […]
Lesson 9: President Lincoln; What Can Strauss-Kahn Learn From Him?
In his interview with BigThink, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria quotes Lincoln on the relationship between character—moral character—and power. There are many celebrated quotes about character, and Nohria references […]
Lesson 8: Terrence Malick; What Is a Visual Ellipsis?
“Unless you love, your life will flash by.” These are the last words of the voice-over for Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life trailer. There isn’t much that distinguishes them from […]
Lesson 7: How Do You Write An Excellent Obituary? The Economist On Osama bin Laden
If you love The Economist, you likely know and love its back page, its obituary page. Economist obituaries are models of the magazine’s style and, more broadly, models of a […]
Lesson 6: When George Bush Was Eloquent On Osama bin Laden
On September 21st, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he spoke about justice, and addressed frankly what the American […]
Lesson 5: The Language of Response: Leon Weiseltier on “The Case For Joy” And Osama
The experts will do the analysis, but the philosophers will parse the emotions. Leon Weiseltier has this piece, on The New Republic’s website, in which he talks about the difference […]
Lesson 4: President Obama’s Historic Announcement: Bin Laden Is Dead
It will be one of the most closely—and widely—read speeches of any U.S. President in the twenty-first century, and perhaps even one of the most closely read of any U.S. […]
Lesson 3: A New Yorker Blog About WikiLeaks, And Presidential Phrases
Amy Davidson’s post about the WikiLeaks Guantanamo release is an excellent example of writing short, with feeling—and meaning. One reason so many of the New Yorker blogs work well with […]
English Lesson 2: Homer, and Homecomings; Our American Soldiers
There is so much beautiful writing about war. One of the first, best stories of a soldier (and his return home) is Homer’s The Odyssey. It captures –metaphorically, and at […]
English Lesson 1: T.S. Eliot, and April
English Lessons is a new blog celebrating writing we love, and illuminating why we love it—and what we can learn from it. Poetry, fiction, editorials; Presidential speeches, classic texts, popular […]
Shakespeare and David Foster Wallace: The Pale King and Hamlet
Looking at the language of critical response to the novel, there are parallels. This is not to say that David Foster Wallace cared for Hamlet. But he seemed to care […]
Was Bob Dylan the 20th Century’s Shakespeare?
We didn’t mind Maureen Dowd’s dismantling of (whatever remains of) the mythologizing of Dylan as a hero for/of protest. There was a moment in time when Dylan was hero for […]
Write Like Shakespeare
This is Twilight, for poets. It’s not designed to fly over your head; it’s designed as to shoot straight to your heart.
Write Like David Foster Wallace
John Jeremiah Sullivan has written a beautiful, beautiful piece about David Foster Wallace in GQ. It isn’t easy to write about Wallace; how Sullivan chooses to do it is illuminating. […]
Write Like The New Yorker’s Rick Hertzberg
Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. […]
Write Like: A Poetry Critic, The New York Times’s David Orr
Orr’s piece in the New York Times Book Reviewon an O magazine photo shoot with young poets is a perfect example of how to write about something you know a […]
The Paris Review Interview With Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm is a careful writer. The new Paris Review has an interview with her. The Review still publishes the best interviews on code-cracking the art of writing. This exchange—which […]